Metaverse Evolution: Gaming leads, AI assists, XR takes the lead in breaking the game

Image credit: Generated by Unbounded AI tools

Source: The Paper

Author: Reporter Shao Bingyan, intern Yang Yuting

Original title: What the Big Model Means for the Metaverse: End or Rebirth? "

“The future metaverse should be said that all roads lead to Rome, and each path is a road to build content for the metaverse.” Zhang Zhaogong, associate professor and head of the game design department at Communication University of China, made a speech at the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference said above.

“Today, the Metaverse is essentially the logic of value increment.” Wang Mao, general manager of Alibaba Cloud Game Division (Yuanjing), said at the conference that the value of the Metaverse is not a simple logic of stock conversion, nor Copy the real world, or add a dimension to the current simple Internet to achieve three-dimensionality.

On July 8, the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference with the theme of “Intelligently Connected World, Creating the Future” closed at the Shanghai World Expo Center. Two years ago, the concept of the Metaverse became popular. From Nvidia’s Lao Huang to Facebook’s Xiaozha, and then to domestic Baidu, NetEase, and Tencent, Internet giants laid out positions one after another. The industry once believed that the first year of the Metaverse was coming. With the rise of artificial intelligence applications such as ChatGPT this year, the Metaverse, which had previously shined brilliantly, seems to have cooled down. Against this background, what room for development does the Metaverse have? What other investment markets are worth looking forward to in the future?

Multiple industry metaverse application scenarios have landed, leading the game field

The concept of the metaverse (Metaverse) first came from Stephenson’s science fiction novel “Avalanche” published in 1992, which described a virtual world similar to the real world - Metaverse. In “Avalanche”, Stephenson described a cyberspace parallel to the real world, where the experiencer puts on headphones and eyepieces, and can enter a virtual world simulated by a computer and parallel to the real world through a virtual avatar.

The industry generally believes that artificial intelligence is one of the key factors in the development of the Metaverse. At this conference, many industry experts and business people shared, demonstrated and judged that after two years of development, Metaverse has been applied in different industries, including industry, film and television, technical training, cultural tourism, medical care and other fields. In the field of tourism, for example, through digital equipment and digital technology, we can create colorful real scenes, dreamy virtual scenes, and cross-border interactions; with digital light and shadow technology, we use laser digital light and shadow shows, 3Dmapping, interactive technology entertainment, AR and other multiple presentation forms in one, Immersive interactive night tour experience without live performances, etc.

In the medical field, Hu Weiguo, vice president of Ruijin Hospital Affiliated to Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine, introduced at the conference that metaverse content and scene support in this field include digital diagnosis and treatment services for patients, hospital operation scene construction, adjuvant treatment and precision medicine , Clinical ward scene construction, etc.

Among them, in terms of adjuvant therapy and precision medicine, Hu Weiguo mentioned in his speech at the conference that the application of mixed reality technology can realize the fusion of holographic images and real operations in the lesion area during surgery, and cooperate with other automated technologies used in surgical operations to achieve adjuvant therapy. Including fast 3D reconstruction based on AI, preoperative surgical path planning for patients with brain granuloma, intraoperative assisted precise positioning, shortening operation time, and reducing intraoperative bleeding; in carotid endarterectomy, the application of mixed reality, intraoperative Neuro-electrophysiological monitoring and other technical means, preoperative assistance in “fluoroscopy” to locate the carotid bifurcation stenosis position, intraoperative “escort” under neuro-electrophysiological monitoring.

And the most closely related to the technological development of the “Metaverse” belongs to the game industry.

"The metaverse is more like a destination we will definitely go to, but there are many blocks and paths in these destinations. Among them, I think the most important one is the game path we are in, because it is highly overlapped with the metaverse. Whether it’s production tools or creative methods.” Zhang Zhaogong, associate professor and head of the game design department at Communication University of China, said at the conference.

Guo Kuangye, deputy general manager of Alibaba Cloud Game Division (Yuanjing), said in an interview with The Paper during the conference that from the current market, the core technology of the game is being exported to the Yuanverse. From the perspective of landing, it is more about the metaverse within the game industry. From the perspective of tools, the game industry has been developing and accumulating since a long time ago, with very solid content and funds, which can better connect with the Metaverse.

“In the past few years, we have started to review the technical experience of the game industry, export it to the metaverse, and slowly feed it back to other industries.” Guo Kuangye said to The Paper reporter, "Practitioners in the metaverse are actually paying close attention to the technology of the game industry. The progress is also to see what new opportunities can be brought to them from the game industry to other industries.”

Yuanjing is a Yuanverse and cloud game technology service brand under Alibaba, established in 2021. It is Ali’s further layout in the field of metaverse and cloud games when the metaverse is booming.

Previously, Ali insiders revealed to the media that the company’s future business is related to Metaverse. This time, Guo Kuangye also revealed at the conference that in the past two or three years, the main work of Yuanjing has gradually deepened the promotion and ecological popularization of cloud game technology in the Metaverse market.

The development opportunities of the metaverse under AIGC’s popularity: intelligent interaction is improved, and costs are reduced

Since the beginning of this year, the generative AI technology led by ChatGPT has developed rapidly, and the volume of the previously hot Metaverse seems to have weakened a lot.

Guo Kuangye told The Paper that he does not agree with the “metaverse cooling theory”, “it is normal that the topics related to the metaverse have decreased. When the metaverse became hot two or three years ago, everyone knew that its final form was a long-term Yes, it is still relatively far away from us, and it will take a long time for the metaverse ecology including content and technology to develop. However, this does not affect the continuous innovation of metaverse technologies, solutions and products in stages, as well as the digital transformation of various industries. promotion.”

“Now the Metaverse industry is moving from the original hot spot and barbaric growth to a healthy and sustainable stage.” Guo Kuangye also told The Paper that a long-term development trend of the Metaverse is the next generation after PC and mobile Internet The emergence of the Internet and AIGC is also pushing the metaverse to slowly develop towards a 3D, interconnected, and highly immersive Internet. This year, Yuanjing will put more emphasis on the value creation of the Metaverse, focusing on the combination of the scenario solutions of the Metaverse and the real economy.

In the context of the explosive growth of large models, how will the Metaverse develop? Many industry insiders said that the former provided a big booster for the development of the Metaverse.

“AIGC stimulates the mass production of high-quality content, which will accelerate the development of the metaverse. We believe that in the next stage, AI is expected to create a relatively complete digital scene according to human instructions.” More professional tools to promote. With the launch of tools such as Midjourney and stable diffusion this year, we have seen AI-assisted UGC gradually become a reality, which greatly promotes the growth of content and gradually reduces the cost of content production in the Metaverse.

Qualcomm Global Senior Vice President Cheng Lixin said at the conference that 5G and AI technologies will empower Metaverse with new application services, environments and experiences. At present, the development of XR is largely limited by the high cost of content production and the fragmentation of the application ecosystem, while the maturity and wide application of AIGC will greatly improve the production efficiency of Metaverse content.

What is the value of AIGC to the metaverse? Shen Yang said that AIGC has greatly improved the intelligent interaction of various intelligent equipment involved in the Metaverse. “Looking at the large-scale model of spatial computing today, there are basically no large-scale models on the market, but this should be something that everyone needs to do in the next two to three years. The large-scale model is not only for language, but also for multi-modality. In the future Upgraded to the Metaverse.”

“The emergence of any new technology needs to be settled in specific business scenarios. The development of technologies such as AIGC and large models will not affect the metaverse, but will integrate and promote the development of the metaverse.” Guo Kuangye said , although some previous metaverse products and applications have good rendering effects, their production cost is far higher than that of an ordinary web page. With the assistance of AIGC, the cost of content production will be reduced rapidly, and the entry threshold for content production will be lowered. Just as the development of short video content production tools in the past has brought about a corresponding business explosion, the lowering of the threshold for 3D content production will trigger The metaverse content creation boom of the whole society.

XR market is expected to reach the size of smartphones

“I believe that the XR market will eventually reach a scale comparable to that of smartphones.” Cheng Lixin, senior vice president of Qualcomm, said at the conference that XR is a new generation of mobile computing platforms with broad prospects and infinite possibilities. XR devices can use spatial computing technology , connecting the physical space and the digital space together, accelerating the original new era, will become the entrance for consumers to the Metaverse.

According to public information, XR refers to extended reality, which is essentially a collection of VR (virtual reality)/AR (augmented reality)/MR (mixed reality). The “immersion” that seamlessly transitions between the virtual world and the real world. XR is regarded as one of the important technologies in the metaverse field.

In October last year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the State Administration of Radio and Television, and the State General Administration of Sports jointly issued the “Action Plan for the Integration and Development of Virtual Reality and Industry Applications (2022-2026)”. By 2026, it is estimated that the overall scale of my country’s virtual reality industry (including related hardware, software, applications, etc.) will exceed 350 billion yuan, and the cumulative sales of virtual reality terminals will exceed 25 million units. Cultivate 100 backbone enterprises with strong innovation capabilities and industry influence, create 10 agglomerations with regional influence and lead the ecological development of virtual reality, and build 10 industrial public service platforms.

Shen Yang said that the world’s technology giants have made major strategic layouts for the metaverse, comprehensively strengthened technology research and development and industrial empowerment, and continued to increase XR investment. However, the implementation of the above-mentioned action plan still faces great difficulties and challenges. At present, it is necessary to think about how to improve the interactivity of hardware devices and further do a good job in this area.

“As people’s demand for generative AI grows, hybrid AI will become the future of AI.” Cheng Lixin also said that the generative AI model not only puts extremely high demands on basic computing facilities, but also requires inference in the cloud. The cost has also become very high, so in order to release the full potential of generative AI, it is necessary to truly realize the large-scale expansion of generative AI in XR and more terminal fields, so that it not only needs to be processed in the cloud, but also requires Distributed processing is performed on billions of network source terminals that can perform high-performance AI computing with low power consumption. This is the so-called hybrid AI.